Is this a thought-through or an emotional statement?... A bit disheartening to know true tsn specimen are almost non existent any more...
You propose some good "food for thought" questions. Id say as the yrs go on, well see more man made hybrids and less wc specimen. Most w/c's or claimed to be wc end up bein faciatum...or farm raised hybrids now that we know for sure thats a viable option. If you look at older members specimen 2005 and previous yrs youll notice alot more variety in colors/patterns and id suspect thats because they were still being wild caught back when. Not a bad thing to supply the pet industry with "food grade" hybrid tsn... but where does that leave us who know better lol... ive had dozens of farmies over the yrs... guess we'll just have to wait for Wes to collect some real w/c ones for us again. Im sure theres still a possibility for some gems to sneak in through from other sources but with the amt of farming that window gets smaller imo.Is this a thought-through or an emotional statement?
I mean we realize that hybridization is more widespread than we thought but I, for one, have no clue still of its magnitude.
What is the portion of hybrids in the ornamental TSN trade? 50%? 75%? 90%? 99%?
What portion of TSN labeled as w/c is indeed w/c? 25%? 50%? 75%?
What portion of true w/c TSN might be hybrids? 10%? 25%?
https://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/...pictus-trio-2-6-years-old-in-4500-gal.681640/Prefer straight L. pictus!
Thanks to wednesday13 for pointing out that the fish of this article look different from what we see in our trade, so fasciatum x marmoratus may still stand for us.The hybrids have escaped and been found in the wild:
http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=45792#p309852
An interesting tidbit is that the mother species of the ones caught in the wild appears to be P. reticulatum, not P. fasciatum as we previously assumed.
Still though, there are a few variants of the TSN x Lei hybrids with different parental species that had surely been made in some quantity ( wednesday13 showed us photos before), it's just not clear which one or which ones have been chosen for mass production or whether there was just one chosen.
Looks like P. reticulatum x L. marmoratus must be it of at least one of them.